The Witness Is Getting a Visual Upgrade Patch for PS4 Pro, Here Are the Details

Released back in January on both PlayStation 4 and PC, The Witness garnered a plethora of great reviews for its clever puzzles, great presentation, and enthralling environment. Now, with the PlayStation 4 Pro coming soon, Jonathan Blow and his crew have decided to spruce things up for a patch for The Witness on the updated console. He details some of the enhancements on his website:

“The Witness already runs at a consistent 60fps on the base PlayStation 4, so rather than increasing frame rate, our patch is about visual quality. Please don’t take the specifics mentioned here as absolute promises; things might change by release. But here’s what we are aiming for:

When you start up the game on a PS4 Pro, it will go into one of two modes, depending on the current display device:

“When using PS4 Pro with a 4k display, we will render at 1440p or possibly higher, all while keeping a consistent 60 frames per second. This image will then be upscaled to 4k, and we will draw text, menus, and other UI at native 4k resolution. (This is similar to what happens on the base PS4, where we render the 3D scene at 900p, then upscale to 1080p and draw UI at 1080p). We might be able to achieve resolutions higher than 1440p based on various engineering tradeoffs (for example, if we boost the resolution of the main scene to a greater degree than we boost the resolution of the reflections in water, which tend to be distorted anyway. Also, we’ll evaluate checkerboard rendering — we’re not sure if it’s the right way to go for this game, but we’ll see.) We’ll post again when we finalize these specs.”

He goes on:

“When using PS4 Pro with a display that is 1080p or lower, we will render the scene at 1080p (instead of the old 900p), and increase antialiasing quality from 2x to 4x MSAA, again while keeping a solid 60 frames per second. We are exploring additional visual quality increases, like increased streaming distance for high-resolution meshes, or decreasing the noticeability of the fade-in between faraway LODs and high-res close-up meshes. Again, we’ll post details when this is finalized!
We’re also working on HDR support. Here in the office we just got a new LG B6P television, which is very bright and has low black levels, providing a lot of dynamic range, and it’s been fun so far tweaking the look of the game on HDR displays like this.

We thought we were working on HDR support only for the PS4 Pro, but yesterday Sony announced that they will be enabling HDR support on all PS4s via a firmware update. Sometimes Sony even surprises developers! (Back when the PS4 was originally announced, we were surprised by some of the final specs too … and I was on stage in that show!)”

It seems that no matter what display you are using, there is something for every player getting a PS4 Pro. Obviously, 4K display users will get a prettier picture, but based on Blow’s description of the patch, the graphics are going to be improved regardless.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any gameplay tweaks coming to The Witness for PS4 Pro, but if there are any updates to this information, we will let you know. Right now, the patch is set to come Nov. 10, the same day as the PS4 Pro’s release, so if you were waiting to play The Witness for some reason, and were thinking of buying a PS4 Pro, then November is the best time to get it.